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  • Passage to Promise Land: Voices of Chinese Immigrant Women to Canada by Vivienne Poy
  • Patricia E. Roy
Vivienne Poy. Passage to Promise Land: Voices of Chinese Immigrant Women to Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013. xxiv, 262 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. $39.95 cloth.

Vivienne Poy is exceptionally well-qualified to interview women who emigrated from China or Hong Kong to Canada between 1950 and 1989 and to analyse her findings. Poy came from Hong Kong to Canada in 1959 as a student, is fluent in Cantonese, and has established strong political connections. She served in the Senate and her sister-in-law was Governor-General. After a career in business, she undertook formal studies in History and earned a doctorate for the thesis on which the book is based.

This is really two studies in one: a study of female Chinese immigrants and another of Canadian immigration policies. Interspersed among lengthy extracts from the interviews, Poy sketches both the economic, social, political, and cultural aspects of Chinese history that impelled these women to leave and the Canadian immigration policy and practice that long denied them entry but later welcomed them. A minor theme is the discretionary power of Canadian immigration officials in deciding on admissions.

The twenty-eight interviews are the unique contribution of this volume. Future scholars must thank Poy for collecting them in 2000 and 2003 and following up on some in 2010. One hopes that the full transcripts will find their way into an archives as they supplement the stories in Jin Guo: Voices of Chinese Canadian Women, a 1992 publication of the Toronto-based Women’s Book Committee of the Chinese Canadian National Council, a book which curiously is not in Poy’s bibliography. The interviews, which follow a lifestyle format, were conducted in Victoria, Toronto and Ottawa. The interviewees were randomly chosen but, apart from thanking Paul Chan, a former president of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, for helping to arrange the interviews in Victoria and for acting as interpreter for Szeyup speakers, she does not indicate how the randomness was carried out.

The interviewees range from women who came in the early 1950s after revised immigration laws permitted family reunification to the women who came from Hong Kong after Canada began judging potential immigrants by their skills rather than their place of origin. The interviews exclude Mandarin speakers because of their relatively recent arrival and their life experiences which differ from those of the [End Page 177] earlier immigrants. They also exclude female entrepreneurs who came as partners with their husbands. Poy concedes that all of the interviewees have done reasonably well in Canada and sensibly points out that a comparison with women who did poorly should be done.

Poy’s central thesis is that, save for a few who chose not to exercise it fully, these women had agency within the strictures of Chinese patriarchy and Canadian immigration policies and laws as they could make choices. For all, education was important. This was particularly true of the well-educated women from Hong Kong, but the women who joined their husbands in the 1950s, although often confined to low-skilled jobs because of their limited knowledge of English, took great satisfaction from the successes of their children in business and the professions. Perhaps because these early migrants, some of whom were picture brides, had suffered through wars and the Communist revolution, they seemed much happier with Canada than the later Hong Kong migrants, many of whom came from wealthy families and with higher expectations. Many early immigrants claimed to have had no personal experience with discrimination in Canada whereas some later ones experienced it especially in respect to real estate.

Poy attributes the thriving state of today’s Chinese communities in Canada to the influx of new immigrants. Immigration also caused conflict with the tusheng, the Canadian-born Chinese, who believed that their acculturation to North America entitled them to be the leaders of the Chinese community. By the 1970s, however, the tusheng and the immigrants worked together in forming a Chinese Canadian identity. This important proposition, which Wing Chung Ng has examined in The Chinese in...

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